Researchers capture amazing video of rattlesnake striking prey

Researchers at the Higham Lab at the University of California, Riverside captured this video with a high-speed camera of a Mohave rattlesnake striking a kangaroo rat.

Media: Higham Lab

Researchers at the Higham Lab at the University of California, Riverside set up a high-speed camera to capture something rarely seen on camera: a rattlesnake attacking its prey.

You can see in the video above, a Mohave rattlesnake quickly moves to strike a kangaroo rat as it hops by. In this case, the rat was able to detect the snake's movement in time to jump out of the way and escape.

Tim Higham, an associate professor at UC Riverside, says the animals in this video are free-ranging, so they had to set up cameras to capture the moment. They tracked the snakes' movement and set up cameras in the field around areas they would usually hunt.

"Obtaining these videos was incredibly difficult. We spent three months in the field (six days per week, 10 hours per night) and only obtained eight strikes. In other words, it took approximately two and a half weeks to obtain a single strike!" Higham told SFGATE.

To catch the strike in detail, the researchers used a high-speed camera that records 500 frames per second then played the video back, slowed down by 30 times.

A screenshot from the video shows the rattlesnake nearly striking the kangaroo rat.

A screenshot from the video shows the rattlesnake nearly striking the kangaroo rat.

Photo: Higham Lab

Photo: Higham Lab

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A screenshot from the video shows the rattlesnake nearly striking the kangaroo rat.

A screenshot from the video shows the rattlesnake nearly striking the kangaroo rat.

Photo: Higham Lab

Researchers capture amazing video of rattlesnake striking prey

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Also, because rattlesnakes mainly hunt at night, they used infrared lighting that is visible to cameras, but not to animals.

It appears that all the hard work was worth it in the end.

"The performance of both the snake and kangaroo rat were incredibly impressive," Higham said, "something we didn't fully understand before this study."